Lists Jaws 12 Things You Didn’t Know About Jaws For its 50th anniversary, find out more about how the very first summer blockbuster was made. By Don Kaye | Published on June 20, 2025 Credit: Universal Pictures Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Universal Pictures Arriving in theaters 50 years ago today (on June 20, 1975), Jaws was a groundbreaking movie in many ways. Aside from being the first “summer blockbuster” (more on that later), it was one of the most influential action thrillers of the next five decades. It changed the way movies were marketed and distributed, and became the breakout film for director Steven Spielberg, just 28 years old at the time and now one of the greatest living filmmakers of his age. Jaws became a pop culture phenomenon and, for two years, was the highest grossing movie ever made until another summer event film, Star Wars, came along to unseat it. Based on the best-selling novel by Peter Benchley, Jaws is a simple story on the surface: it’s set in the small Long Island resort town of Amity, where a great white shark has begun killing people in the water. The town’s chief of police (Roy Scheider) tries desperately to close the beaches—against the wishes of Amity’s greed-driven mayor (Murray Hamilton)—and finally heads out to sea himself with a crusty shark hunter (Robert Shaw) and a marine biologist (Richard Dreyfuss) in a last-ditch effort to kill the beast. Jaws was the #1 film at the box office for 14 straight weeks when it first came out, and has been re-released multiple times in theaters and on home video. Yet for all its success, this was a film that was plagued with problems almost from the start: its three mechanical sharks (nicknamed Bruce, after Spielberg’s lawyer) all worked poorly, if at all; the movie blew past its budget and schedule thanks to the unpredictable nature of shooting on location and on the ocean; and the script was rewritten daily. Even with all that, what emerged was nothing less than a masterpiece of suspense and terror. Here are a dozen things you (probably) didn’t know about Jaws, from the original concept for the book to the way it changed the motion picture industry.  Peter Benchley’s earliest version of the book was… a comedy? In the early 1970s, Peter Benchley was a struggling non-fiction writer. But when he pitched the idea of a novel about a small beach town under siege by a great white shark, editor Thomas Congdon at Doubleday bit (no pun intended), advancing Benchley $7,500 for the first 100 pages. There was only one problem, however. “The first five pages were just wonderful,” Congdon told BBC News Online. “They just went in to the eventual book without any changes. The other 95 pages though were on the wrong track. They were humorous. And humor isn’t the proper vehicle for a great thriller.” Congdon asked Benchley for a rewrite more in line with those opening pages, and the finished manuscript was eventually delivered in early 1973. The book did not have its title until the last minute Credit: Universal Pictures Benchley did not have a title for his book when he submitted it. Among the candidates were A Stillness in the Water, Leviathan Rising, and The Jaws of Death, but none of them stuck. Benchley told author Brett Gilliam in his book Diving Pioneers and Innovators that he and Congdon went through “125 titles” before finally settling on Jaws “20 minutes” before the book had to go into production. “I said to Tom, ‘Look, we can’t agree on a title. In fact, the only word we both like is ‘jaws,’” Benchley recalled. “‘Why don’t we call the bloody thing Jaws?” When Congdon asked what it meant, Benchley replied, “Who knows? At least it’s short.” A TV movie was Steven Spielberg’s calling card to direct Jaws Credit: ABC Steven Spielberg only had one feature, The Sugarland Express, to his credit in 1974, along with a lot of TV work. But Spielberg desperately wanted to direct Jaws after reading the novel, which he thought shared similar elements with Duel, the TV movie he directed in which a traveling salesman is terrorized on a lonely road by an unseen driver in a massive truck. Spielberg felt both stories were about average working people battling almost supernatural monsters. Ironically, after landing the assignment, he got cold feet and almost backed out of Jaws to direct a comedy called Lucky Lady. But good sense prevailed, and in a nod to Duel, Spielberg mixed the sound of the truck’s fiery end into the audio of the shark’s explosive death in Jaws. The trio of stars were not the first choices Credit: Universal Pictures It’s impossible nowadays to think of anyone but Roy Scheider as police chief Martin Brody, Robert Shaw as shark fisherman Quint, and Richard Dreyfuss as marine biologist Matt Hooper, but they weren’t the first potential names on the call sheet. Universal Pictures execs wanted bigger stars in the movie, while Spielberg thought that lesser-known actors would add to its realism. That’s why it must have felt strange to consider Charlton Heston—busy saving airliners and Los Angeles in movies like Airport ’75 and Earthquake—for Brody, in what seemed like a much smaller scenario than the Ten Commandments star was used to. The role of Brody was offered to Robert Duvall, but he wanted to play Quint instead. Tough guys Lee Marvin and Sterling Hayden both passed on that part before Shaw accepted. As for Hooper, up-and-coming actors up for the role included Jeff Bridges, Jon Voight, Timothy Bottoms, and Jan-Michael Vincent, but Spielberg chose Richard Dreyfuss on the advice of his good friend George Lucas. Spielberg threw out most of the book’s subplots Credit: Universal Pictures Steven Spielberg envisioned Jaws as a thrilling shark-hunt adventure on the high seas, but the novel was very nearly a soap opera, with Peter Benchley squeezing in a number of salacious subplots. In the book, Brody’s wife Ellen has an affair with Hooper, who she knew back when they both spent summers in Amity as kids. Spielberg had that removed, fearing it would make the characters unsympathetic. Additionally, the book’s Mayor Vaughn owes the Mafia a lot of money, which he can only pay off if Amity keeps the beaches open. The mob goes as far as killing Chief Brody’s cat in his front yard as a threat. That was also a non-starter, with Vaughn’s motivation in the movie now a deeply misguided concern over the town’s loss of tourism. Spielberg also had the ending changed: in the book, both Quint and Hooper die before the shark finally succumbs to multiple harpoon wounds and sinks silently into the depths. In the movie, Hooper lives and Brody blows up the shark with an air tank and a lucky gunshot—a much more cinematic demise, to be sure. The shooting schedule tripled from 55 days to 159 days Credit: Universal Pictures Jaws was given a budget of $3.5 million (in 1975 dollars) and a 55-day shooting schedule. By the time the movie was finished filming, the schedule swelled to literally three times the original length—topping out at 159 days—and the budget had ballooned to anywhere from $7 million to $11 million, depending on the source (then, as now, budgets are one of Hollywood’s most closely guarded secrets). Filming on location in Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the coast of Massachusetts, shooting fully one-third of the movie on the open ocean—something never done before on a major motion picture—and utilizing three mechanical sharks that kept failing to function all contributed to the movie almost spinning out of control. Spielberg began shooting the film without a finished script; screenwriter Carl Gottlieb (who also played the newspaper editor Meadows) penned the next day’s scenes every night back at the hotel. In the end, the experience made Spielberg a better filmmaker—forced to show less of the shark, he relied on the tension and fear forged by its largely unseen presence. A soon-to-be-famous director worked on the movie’s crew Credit: Universal Pictures Remember the sequence in Jaws where two fishermen lob a holiday roast off a short pier in an effort to catch the shark, only for the monster to take the bait, wreck the pier, and dump one of the men into the drink? Carl Gottlieb writes in his essential book on the making of the movie, The Jaws Log, that one of the crew members who worked on rigging the breakaway pier for the sequence was director John Landis. At the time he had just directed the low-budget 1973 horror comedy Schlock, and had been invited out to Martha’s Vineyard for a meeting with Spielberg. Landis stuck around the set and, because the production needed an extra set of hands, eventually got recruited to build and set up the pier for that scene. Landis later embarked on a successful directing career of his own, with titles like National Lampoon’s Animal House, An American Werewolf in London, The Blues Brothers, Coming to America, and the iconic music video for Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” all on his resume. The “bigger boat” line was reshot so that audiences could hear it Credit: Universal Pictures Following a test screening of the nearly completed movie, Steven Spielberg and editor Verna Fields (whose heroic work on Jaws earned her an Oscar) tweaked a couple of scenes for maximum impact. The first was when the shark initially appears at the stern of the Orca, scaring the hell out of Brody, who tells Quint, “You’re gonna need a bigger boat.” The line itself was improvised, but arose from the crew’s real-life issues with the size of the craft used to transport the production gear out to the spot in the ocean where they were filming. According to David Yewdall’s Practical Art of Motion Picture Sound, the line got lost in the test screening as the audience responded to the shocking emergence of the great white. So Spielberg and Fields extended Brody’s reaction, giving the audience a few more seconds to settle down before Roy Scheider uttered the now-immortal phrase. The “head in the hull” scene was filmed in a swimming pool Credit: Universal Pictures The second scene reworked for Jaws was reshot after principal photography was completed, long before “post-production photography” became a regular part of tentpole shooting schedules. The sequence in which Brody and Hooper find the wrecked boat of local fisherman Ben Gardner, only for Gardner’s severed head to pop out of a hole in the hull in front of a terrified Hooper, is one of the biggest jump scares in the film. But Spielberg was unhappy with the way it turned out, and Universal was unwilling to pay for additional shooting. So the director opened his own wallet to redo the shot, which he ended up filming in Verna Fields’ swimming pool. With black plastic covering the top of the pool and a container of milk poured into the water to give it a murky ocean look, the “head shot” was refashioned to Spielberg’s satisfaction—and the screams of audiences everywhere. P.S.: Universal picked up the tab after all. Why a scene from Moby-Dick was not in the movie Credit: MGM Speaking of Ben Gardner, the role was played by local Martha’s Vineyard fisherman Craig Kingsbury, whose eccentric mannerisms and expressions were a large influence on Robert Shaw’s portrayal of Quint. But Quint was also inspired by one of the classic characters in all of literature, Captain Ahab from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, whose obsession with capturing the white whale is echoed by Quint’s descent into near-madness in his efforts to kill the shark. Spielberg wanted to make the connection even more apparent by including a scene in which Quint is introduced watching John Huston’s 1956 film of Moby-Dick in a theater, but Gregory Peck—who played Ahab in the adaptation and owned the rights to the film—would not allow him to use it because he was unhappy with his performance. Who wrote Robert Shaw’s famous monologue about the U.S.S. Indianapolis? Credit: Universal Pictures In a now-classic scene, Brody, Quint, and Hooper sit around the cabin of the Orca at night, drinking and comparing scars. Quint reveals that he survived the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis during World War II, one of just over 300 crew members who lived while hundreds more died—many of them eaten by sharks, thus giving Quint his lifelong hatred of the fish. The monologue is absolutely mesmerizing, but the credit for it has been a subject of debate over the years. Carl Gottlieb writes in The Jaws Log that he, Spielberg, and others—including screenwriters Howard Sackler (who conceived of the speech) and John Milius—all worked on it, but it was Robert Shaw himself who looked at the various drafts, did some of his own research, and wrote the version that appears in the film. The marketing plan for Jaws was mapped out in a bathroom Credit: Universal Pictures Also according to Gottlieb, the first sneak preview for Jaws was held in Dallas, where it went over like gangbusters. The second took place in Long Beach, California, closer to Hollywood, with top executives from Universal Pictures in attendance. This one did even better, so the Universal brain trust gathered in the men’s room—the only place where they could talk without an excited crowd around—and decided on the spot to completely change the release plans for the film. Instead of opening in a few select big cities and expanding to the rest of the country over weeks and months—which was the way they did it back in those days—they opted to send Jaws out on 500 screens (a huge number at the time) all at once. And with that, the heads of Universal invented the “summer blockbuster,” altering the way that movies were distributed and turning them into “events.”[end-mark]                                                                                                                         The post 12 Things You Didn’t Know About <i>Jaws</i> appeared first on Reactor.